Did some autocrossing with the fit on sunday for the first time bone stock. It was really fun!! I got 1st place in the novice HS class! I will be doing this more often but with some new supension and wheels and tires.

 

What other cars did you go up against?

 

a fully built impreza RS 2.5 and a lightly modified sentra SE-R

 

How did the car feel at different points through the turns? I am curious about your connected-ness during turn-in and exiting corners.

I don't need to know about acceleration...pretty much got that figured out lol.

 

i thought HS was "H-Stock"?
how were you against a Fully Built Impreza and modified Sentra?

 

and how did you beat them.no offence but they are better cars

 

I am talking about in the novice class. Somehow they where in the novice class too and I beat them just because of my handicaps and consistant times. Plus I didn't hit any cones to lose time and I DNF once. Yes I was in the H-stock class and won in that class but they were in differnent classes too. The SE-R was running the same times I was and the impreza was running about 7 sec faster than me. So basically what it boils down to is I beat them as far as novice goes.

 

It felt pretty good and more forgiving to drive then my STi. It had a lot of body roll of course cuz I didn't have any springs or anything. Entering the turns wasn't too bad but coming kind of sucked cuz it just wanted to spin the tires. I saw 1st gear a lot while turning cuz 2nd had no torque. Oh and entering it wanted to understeer just a little then it would come back.

 

True, there are many different classes at autocross.

Mostly you can look at how you did overall in your own class (H-stock).
You can compare your novice time with others more experienced but you are all in the same class and eventually you will compete with them head to head.

Then you can compare against all other novice drivers with and without handicap or PAX. See how you did.

Then you can compare with PAX to overall times against all drivers of all classes with their PAX.

In H-stock your PAX handicap is very large so that if you can finish in the top 10-20% of raw times you can usually finish in the top 10 overall for the day which is really good but won't be so easy depending on how large the field is.

We usually have 100-120+ drivers and usually an H-stock or G-stock car is in the top 6 or even first.

 

Thanks for the feedback! I will be running a an autox tomorrow and am looking forward to it!

 

Just got back from roughly 15 runs with a practice autox session today. I was very happy with the stock feel after inflating the front tires a bit. With summer tires and a better check on body roll it should handle down right nice!

After getting situated (read: bad driving) I was about 10 sec off the FTD (miata with a turbo, trick suspension, and slicks); 5-8 sec off STi's, 1-4 sec off a GTi, tricked out CRX, and a slew of other cars. There were about 30 of us running and at one point I had four people in the car for a run just for shits and giggles...like driving a Zamboni!

Good times!

 

At my events we can only run alone, no passengers.
For Novice drivers in their first event only, they can have one instructor.
We don't consider them novice after one event and there is not class for novice and no classes for women. All classes are open.

Only with fun runs at the end of the day or for test and tune day are there any runs with passengers and only one is allowed. We consider these rules necessary for safety reasons as cars don't handle very well fully loaded.

So how was your finish within your class and for the day on PAX?

 

Todays run was a closed event to for members to practice prior to tomorrow's western washington sports car council event. The structure of the club does not allow strangers (read: non family, non guest) to participate.

As this was a practice, times and classes were not broken down and PAX was not used. That said, my times were in the bottom third overall with my fastest time coming in was 66 seconds and change. The range went from 56 to almost 100 seconds for clean runs.

In tomorrows real event passengers will not be allowed except for instructors for novices. Due to schedule conflicts I wont be running tomorrow.

 

I just ran my first autox today also (practice) and am very pleased with the way the Fit handled. It's surprisingly easy to drive and even when I hit the limits of the tires it was very predictable and controllable. My best time was also about 10-11 secs slower than the top time for the day ('90 M3 built for STX), but once it started to heat up in the afternoon the times gained about a sec or so from the tires getting slippy. Really fun though, and makes me want to start working on suspension mods now, as well as eventually getting some better tires once the OEM crappers wear out. Anyhow, definitely gonna do this again.

 

shit i wish they had AutoX here in Bahrain

 

Yeah need some better tires. Once I do that I think I will be able to shave a couple more seconds off my time.

 

Ride_the_pony or Chikubi; Do you have any thoughts on your choice of tires. Getting down to our size, tire choices are not as plentiful. Any modifcations I make, I'll attempt to kept the car conforming to H-stock.

 

I was looking for some tires myself and you can find a few on tirerack. BFGoodrich make a good tire that I had on my STi. It's the G-Force Sport. Dunlop and Kumho also have some out too. Just look around and compare them with ratings and reviews. I think I might go with the BFGoodrich tires. They are $70 each and I will probably stay with the 195/55/15 size or change the aspect ratio a to a 195/50/15, which would probably be better for cornering and you don't have so much roll on the sidewalls.

 

Went to a practice event yesterday. Rained cats and dogs most of the time. Thanks to difficient power I kicked some tail, because of a much easier time of modulating throttle and tire spin. The course was setup from a previously run 'Miata-cross' so there were lots of twisties! I was able to finish clean runs faster than a new GTi, several mr2's (mkI), S2000, Mini C S, and a novice in a WRX.
I still have the stock tires, and 'boy howdy', the all season tires came in handy. The poor S2000 looked like it was a drift event.